The Blog

Feb 15, 2008

Adobe Says: "Thousands of Developers are using CF 8"

I don't know if this is a good marketing message for Adobe. I read this as "we can only count thousands, not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands."

I also think it's a little weird that they are marketing a technology by saying "really, people are doing this"... there is a hidden message I'm interpreting there (probably a wrong one, but this is my blog so I'll say what I think). To compare, I've seen marketing messages about Flex that say "Flex does X, learn how" but not "really, there are a lot of people learning/using Flex."

If you follow my blog, you know that I still like CF, but I think other technologies have begun to make HTML-based web development simpler and easier. That's kind of what technologies do; they evolve over time and supersede each other. Otherwise, we'd be writing web sites with punch cards. This is the reason we're using Flex for all new internal apps at CFI instead of Oracle Forms; Flex is just more capable for more reasons than I have time to list here.

I expect a flood of comments to this post about how "I'm working at X and I'm still productive in CF and I love it, it's not going anywhere..." etc., etc.,. I'm not saying that you can't use CF, or be productive in it, or that it's "bad", or dying imminently. I just think that for the most part, there are now technologies that supersede CF from a productivity perspective for most web development use cases.